There's something we do too often when it comes to domestic violence: We define the victim by her relationship with the abuser.

A man killed his girlfriend. A man killed his wife.

As if he is the actor, and she is the object.

In newspaper writing, this is to some degree because we're taught to write in active voice: it's more direct, it's livelier. William Zinsser's "On Writing Well" tells us so. Zinsser also tells us to beware of unconscious sexism in the language, and cautions writers against defining women by their relationship to men.

Critics, of course, say that this is just political correctness run amok, and that people are reading too much into everyday language.

Tell that to Alexis Harris' mother and friends, who want people to know about what a vibrant, sweet young woman Alexis was, rather than have her obscured by the boyfriend who killed her.

When I cover a homicide case these days, I'm usually writing about court proceedings, which focus on the defendant. Victims and survivors may have difficulty talking about their experience or the loved one they lost, but I try to learn something about the victim.

With Tammy Lynn Karen, I learned she was a free spirit and a devoted mother. Her dedication to her daughter and her love for her sister proved to be the undoing for her husband, the man who killed her. The sister's fierce determination to see justice done kept the initial missing-person case alive. When Tammy's remains were found, police unraveled the husband's story.

The slaying of Deborah Glinton, a hard-working woman and devoted mother from the Town of Newburgh, remains unsolved — but her widower, Roscoe, is doing prison time for killing a woman who got involved with him in New York City a few years later.

Katie Connolly loved her kids and new job. She was ready to leave her longtime boyfriend after years of his belittling and controlling behavior, but he killed her, his last act of control.

The litany continues in the news. We saw Kasandra Perkins reduced to an aside in her own murder, overshadowed in news stories by her boyfriend's football-player celebrity.

We're seeing Reeva Steenkamp treated as a bit player in her own death, because of her boyfriend's Olympic and Paralympic fame.

Perkins and Steenkamp have the added indignity of their deaths being portrayed primarily as a tragedy for the men who killed them.